


What Acid Can't Corrode

by ariadnes_string



Category: Wallander (UK TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-10
Updated: 2012-12-10
Packaged: 2017-11-20 18:56:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/588594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariadnes_string/pseuds/ariadnes_string
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The eyes of detectives usually narrowed into slits before too long, a defense, perhaps, against all they had to see.  Not Liepa’s.   That was the thing that started to pull at Kurt as he ferried the Latvian policeman around Ystad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Acid Can't Corrode

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dogpoet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dogpoet/gifts).



> A missing scene, of sorts, for episode 3x02, "The Dogs of Riga." Spoilers for almost everything in that episode.

Later, when he made love to Baiba Liepa, Kurt found himself chasing a dead man. 

She was exquisite, with the kind of strength hidden in frailty that always drew him to women. But he couldn’t help imagining, as he kissed the soft underside of her breasts, that Karlis had been the last person to touch her there—that he was drinking in his scent as well as hers. He explored her body hungrily, searching, he realized, for the trace of something lost. Did she have the same hope, he wondered, as her lips closed around him? Had Karlis told her everything before he died? 

+++

The eyes of detectives usually narrowed into slits before too long, a defense, perhaps, against all they had to see. Not Liepa’s. That was the thing that started to pull at Kurt as he ferried the Latvian policeman around Ystad. His words were opaque at best, but Liepa’s eyes were wide open, searching, haunted. They were beautiful, though it was a strange word to pin on such a hard man.

The irony of his taking Liepa home, plying him with a hot meal and trying to stop him drinking too much was not lost on Kurt. Nor was the fact that Liepa treated his attentions with the same distracted gratitude with which Kurt had so often favored similar efforts. 

He didn’t take it personally. As he told Liepa, drugs were entering Sweden from Latvia via an unknown route. What he cared about was shutting that down.

Nor did he allow himself to notice anything else about the man: not the bleak planes of his face beneath those remarkable eyes; not the pull of his shirt across his shoulders as he reached for the spigot of the wine box; not the trace of some foreign scent, sharp and pungent under the layers of travel sweat and heavy, Eastern European tobacco. And even so, when they they’d reached the limit of both their information and the booze, he was tempted to offer Liepa his own bed for the night instead of the couch.

Liepa wasn’t the only one who’d drunk too much, he told himself sternly, squashing the thought.

+++

The dog woke him some time later. In theory, he slept in her own bed by the door; in practice, Kurt work every morning with a warm muzzle mashed into his shoulder. Now, he made a sound that was more annoyance than alarm and shifted her weight on the mattress.

Half-awake, he turned over to see what was bothering him. And found Karlis Liepa staring down at him.

“Has something happened?,” he said groggily, flicking on the bedside lamp. There must’ve been some new development in the case—perhaps on the Riga end, since his own mobile hadn’t chimed.

But Karlis shook his head and sat heavily on the bed. The dog, fed up, jumped off the other side and headed towards his cushion, nails clicking on the wooden floor.

“Are you all right?” Kurt asked, worried now. “Is it too cold out there?” He pushed himself up a little farther and pulled back the covers, offering Karlis some of his own warmth before he’d thought the gesture through.

“Too cold.” Karlis snorted, as if he found the words funny. “Yes. Yes, maybe, I think it is.”

He leaned forward, reached out a long arm to cup Kurt’s jaw, and kissed him. 

It was as strange as it was unexpected: cheap red wine and cigarettes and the strength of a man’s mouth, lips and teeth and stubble. He fell into it, but his confusion must’ve come through, because Karlis suddenly pulled back, his hand sliding off Kurt’s face like a caress.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his accent thicker with drink and weariness. “Is this okay? I thought—. You take me home—you feed me—and you tell me you have no wife. In Riga these things—. We are so secretive there—there are codes—signals—. But perhaps in Sweden it is different. You will accept my apologies.”

He made as if to rise, but Kurt surprised himself by stopping him with a hand on his wrist. “No. I mean, yes—it’s okay.” And perhaps he had meant for this to happen all along, for all his denial and self-chastisement. “Things aren’t that different in Sweden.”

He leaned in, eager now for the kiss to begin again, and was rewarded with the passion of Liepa’s response. All his reserve seemed lost, now that the initial barrier had been breached, and he plundered Kurt’s mouth with an intensity that was almost painful, his fingers burrowing into Kurt’s hair, pulling him close.

Then, as abruptly as before, he pulled back, a man full of surprising scruples. “But it is dangerous for you—this? I don’t want to cause you trouble—with your superiors. For me—only my wife knows—anything else would mean my job.”

“Wife?” Kurt blinked. It was the first he’d heard of such a person. Karlis wore no ring.

Karlis’s face took on an expression of fondness, colored by something else, guilt perhaps, or yearning. “Baiba, yes. She is a wonderful woman. Beautiful. We have so many secrets from each other now.” He looked mournful for a moment, then recovered. “But this—our lovers—we have never lied to each other about this. I wish very much that you could meet her.”

It was by far the strangest conversation Kurt had ever had with a man in bed. Or with a woman either. He had no idea of the correct response. “I’d like that, too,” he said.

He’d guessed right. A smile broke across Karlis’s face, banishing whatever shadows thinking of his marriage had recalled. He seemed also to decide that all necessary preliminaries had been accomplished. Neat as a cat, he stood and slipped out of his clothes. Kurt had barely a moment to appreciate his narrow frame, the lean muscles moving under his skin, the heft of his cock, before Karlis was under the duvet with him, tangling their limbs together with such ferocity it felt more like a wrestling match than lovemaking.

The strength of his own response surprised Kurt. It had been a long time, he supposed. Even longer since he’d been with a man. 

“Hey,” he said, as much for himself as for Karlis, “slow down, eh? We’ve got time.”

It worked for a while. They lay skin to skin, just touching, breathing, hands skimming over hips and arse. But it didn’t take. Soon Karlis’s urgency returned, and he worked his way down Kurt’s body with mouth and fingers, taking possession of nipples, belly, balls, with a strength for which Kurt felt barely prepared.

Kurt shuddered with every touch, but when he felt Karlis’s tongue circling the tip of his cock, he tried again to call a halt. His first impulse in such matters was always to give pleasure, rather than take, and it bothered him obscurely to be on the receiving end.

“You don’t want this?” Karlis asked, lifting his head. “We can do something else.”

But the sight of him, kneeling there, shattered Kurt’s resolve. Desire had transformed Karlis, brought color to his face and sharpened the line of his mouth. His whole body seemed to vibrate with it.

“No,” Kurt said, sounding breathless to his own ears. “I do. It’s just—what about you? I want to do something for you.”

Karlis laughed. “You do. I mean, you will.” 

Then he took Kurt deep into his mouth, and all possibility of argument ended.

+++

 

Afterwards, they were cold. They pulled the duvet up around their shoulders and lay facing each other. 

“This,” Karlis said, touching the raised white line near Kurt’s heart. “This was close.”

Kurt nodded. He ran his fingers over what was clearly an old bullet wound on Karlis’s side. “This too.”

Karlis shrugged. The light of the bedside lamp caught lines of moisture running down his face.

Kurt wiped the tears away as if they were his own.

“Are you worried about your wife?” he asked.

“No.” Karlis mirrored the gesture, brushing his fingers across Kurt’s cheek. “Or, yes, always—but not like that. It’s only I am glad. Happy that I’ve met you.”

They fell asleep like that, foreheads almost touching, hands entwined, and the covers pulled up past their ears, as if they were young lovers, hiding from the world, and not two men past their youth, scarred and weary, harried by responsibility. If Kurt dreamed that night of the men in the morgue, their tattoos and mutilated faces, he didn’t remember it come morning. 

When he woke, Karlis was gone, leaving nothing but a camera and a note.

+++ 

The acid had only touched her arm, but he still wanted to cry, looking at it. When she touched his face, it felt like a hand reaching from beyond the grave. In the end, it was her generosity that moved him most, that she would let him share her grief. That she let him share the horror of what had been done to her husband.

“Karlis was so nice, when he came back from Sweden” she told him, another gift. “It was as if I had him home again.”

Later, in the Liepas’ sun-soaked flat, he hoped they’d closed the circle.


End file.
